‘What is a Mongol? – As free as the geese in the air, as in unison. The flights of the geese promise us we don’t give up independence, to unite.’

The hundred tribes of the Mongols have come together with one aim: to push back against the walls that have crept onto the steppe – farther than China has ever extended its walls before. Walls are repugnant to a nomad. But can people on horses push them down, even with a united effort?

This story begins when nobody has heard of Mongols – not even most Chinese, who think the vast Northern Waste at its weakest and are right. A spectacular history starts obscurely…

Against Walls is the first in a trilogy that gives voice to the Mongols in their explosive encounter with the great world under Tchingis Khan. Both epic and intimate, Amgalant sees the world through Mongol eyes. It’s different from the world you know.

Description du produit

Présentation de l'éditeur

‘What is a Mongol? – As free as the geese in the air, as in unison. The flights of the geese promise us we don’t give up independence, to unite.’

The hundred tribes of the Mongols have come together with one aim: to push back against the walls that have crept onto the steppe – farther than China has ever extended its walls before. Walls are repugnant to a nomad. But can people on horses push them down, even with a united effort?

This story begins when nobody has heard of Mongols – not even most Chinese, who think the vast Northern Waste at its weakest and are right. A spectacular history starts obscurely…

Against Walls is the first in a trilogy that gives voice to the Mongols in their explosive encounter with the great world under Tchingis Khan. Both epic and intimate, Amgalant sees the world through Mongol eyes. It’s different from the world you know.

Biographie de l'auteur

I'm a woman in my forties and live in Sydney, Australia. Amgalant began when I explored into The Secret History of the Mongols, a 13th century text, and knew I had found my perfect subject. I've always loved ancient/medieval epic and romance, and I've always been drawn to the cultures of tribal peoples, whose history we know too often through hostile or simply alien states - Rome, China. With Amgalant, I want to do justice to The Secret History, its art, its honesty. When they came to write this, their first book, the Mongols had two traditions to hand: oral epic - ubiquitous on the steppe - and stone inscriptions from past 'states on horseback' as the Chinese called them. The one lent poetry, the other concepts of how to tell a history. I argue that both traditions went towards our faulty hero. It isn't glorification. It's art, and it's analysis. Sequence of Amgalant: #1 Of Battles Past #2 When I am King Amgalant One: The Old Ideal is these together #3 Me and Atrocity #4 The Sheep from the Goats Amgalant Two: Tribal Brawls is these together I've published the lot in 2012. Nine years in the make, but I kept them to work on while I learnt, and only now am happy with the first. Amgalant Three, the final, is underway, at this stage titled Wonders and Horrors. My website http://amgalant.com/

Évaluer ce produit

Commentaires client les plus utiles sur Amazon.com

Amazon.com:
4,4 sur 5 étoiles
7 commentaires

Amazon Customer

3,0 sur 5 étoilesgood read

23 février 2013 - Publié sur Amazon.com

Achat vérifié

Three stars does not mean that the book was just 'o.k.' I am disappointed in Amazon for taking such a liberty with my rating.This book came to me free from Amazon. I have read two other books about Genghis Khan, so he is one of my favorite historical characters. The present book was by turns easy and hard to read. The misuse of personal pronouns, punctuation errors and sentence fragmentation made the book difficult for me to read. I read the book in ebook format. Some errors may have been due to the formatting or the edition I had. These are the negatives about the book which garnered a three star rating.The positives far outweighed the negatives. It was a read that I looked forward to each day. It sounds trite to say that Genghis Khan was a truly great man; but, oh my, he was that and more. The author described him as such through her words. She wrote correctly about the things he did and things he accomplished. The author wrote her well researched truth about Genghis Khan making her book a very good read. Thank you, dear author. I look foward to reading your next book in the series.

An all-time favorite. Highly recommended. You won't find a better interpretation of the Secret History of the Mongols. Poetic but built on a mountain of solid scholarship that never detracts from the reader's delight. Books like this completely blow away most library's justifications for failing to preserve and curate independently published fiction. You are missing the boat people.

Amgalant One: The Old Ideal takes the beginning of the slim volume that is The Secret History of the Mongols (which, in the edition I found at Amazon, has fewer than 200 pages of verse) and enlarges it to create a compulsively readable, immersive world. And as this work--roughly six hundred pages in itself--begins an audacious trilogy intended to expand the whole of The Secret History, the prospective reader might ask why, and how, Hammond has so amplified the spare original....

As to the why, it's clear that she is herself enraptured by the time, the place ... and above all the historic characters she fleshes out to live their complex tribal lives. Hammond has researched every aspect of her enterprise, not to harass us with needless historic detail, but to make sure that the experience of the reader will be full and genuine. This is your chance to travel in space and time, and BE THERE, as the Temujin of the text--one day to be known as Genghis Khan--is fashioned into what was prophesied at his birth, when he was born with a blood clot in his fist.

You learn what the Mongols eat (a lot of sheep, it seems) and drink (black milk!). You discover many other things about their tribal culture. But essentially, the novel takes you into the minds of the protagonists as the Secret History plays itself out....Seeing as Mongols saw each other, and the world (I got a new take on ancient China, and the wall intended to keep barbarians out), is where much of the action takes place. Interior conflicts.... Interior/exterior conflicts.... Interior monologues.... Interior dialogues ... trialogues...? Tribal conferences. Alliances with Tartars? War? What to do? Questions are at the heart of this version of the Mongol enterprise, when the future of much of the world could hinge on a shaman's reading of the cracks in a sheep's scapula. The rise of Genghis Khan might have been prophesied, but in this novel it was a supremely complicated thing to those who lived the beginnings of the largest empire known to man in tents.

As for the novel's actual prose, there's an aspect that at first was hard for me to get a handle on.... Hammond is totally (gleefully!) anachronistic, both in authorial commentary and in the speech and thought of her characters, so that the 13th century is displayed through contemporary, sometimes slangy, language. Ta! If you are bothered by anachronism, you will be bothered. As for me, once I adjusted, I thoroughly enjoyed the ride, for Hammond's writing is rich, nuanced, humorous. Also, since there is no record of how her protagonists actually spoke, by simply abdicating from the attempt to "translate" their tribal language(s), she avoids the clunky linguistic contrivances of novelists that attempt to fake ancient and foreign, never written speech....

And I loved the strength and wisdom of the women in this novel, which surprised me, given a society in which they could be one of the spoils of battle.

In sum, Amgalant is a rare and different, wonderful read, although not always easy. Hats off to Hammond for her long, loving and continuing discipline. I look forward to reading the next volume.

Amgalant One: The Old Ideal is the first novel in Bryn Hammond's historical fiction trilogy set in northeast Asia in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. Hammond's protagonist is the person we know as Genghis Khan.

One of the many delights I encountered in this novel was that it's written from the point of view of the Mongols. We speak of the Great Wall of China as if it were a single smartly executed defensive structure built by the civilized Chinese to keep out their "barbarian" neighbors to the north. Maps of the "Great Wall" reveal that it's actually a number of mostly parallel east-to-west walls. The Mongols and their allies viewed these walls as offensive movements by the Chinese to bring more and more "barbarian" territory into China.

Thus: "these ghastly dead gigantic insects that crept across the steppe. . . . These ugly mean-spirited possessions of our mother earth, these worms, these anti-liberty flags and wind-blown banners to imprisonment, these thistles in the grass, these lines of poison. A nomad can do poetry, on walls. The Wall is what we hate. Civilization is what has done us wrong."

Another joy for me is Hammond's unique style, which isn't meant for quick reading but for reading and contemplation. Here are some tidbits:

"`Too stupid for battle. Is that a sort of oxymoron?' His uncle the khan fixed an eye on him. `An oxymoron's the other thing.'"

"At the worst news in the Mongols' history, she wept for joy." (She'd also learned that the man she loved had survived a disastrous war fought against both the Tartars and Chinese.)

"Survivors, for their punishment, have the worst sight."

"Even a suspect action can have a nice consequence."

"There's a funny trick with knowledge of the future: you're not meant to act and twist things up. You're almost meant to know and then forget -- go on as if you didn't know."

"The world's early kings were sacred kings and had to be. Religious awe: tried-and-true to subjugate minds and overthrow the insistent, rowdy equality of tribes. In general, religion is found hand-in-glove with despots."

And I'm so glad to see these "uncivilized" Mongol "barbarians" portrayed as people whose humanity and intelligence equal, when they don't exceed, our own.

The son of a chieftain and his brothers abduct the bride of a member of another clan. They're pleased when the groom makes no futile attempt to fight them off. They didn't want to harm or kill him. The bride, who'd invited her abduction by staring approvingly at her abductor, wastes no time deciding she'd rather have him for a husband than the man she'd been promised to.

The new couple's first child, born on the worst day of that disastrous war, is Genghis Khan.

This is the kind of historical fiction I love. I greatly enjoyed the time I spent with Hammond's Mongols.